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By Laton McCartney

One of the key questions in the evolving cloud computing market centers on which of the virtualization software vendors -- Red Hat, VMware or Microsoft -- will take the lead in providing the enterprise virtualization platforms that serve as the foundations of cloud services.

Of the three main competitors, Red Hat got a major boost major Tuesday when IBM announced it has selected Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a platform in its new cloud computing service for development and testing. "Our decade-long partnership with Red Hat has always been focused on customer value and innovation," said Maria Azua, vice president for cloud computing enablement at IBM. "Today, we are extending this partnership to include cloud computing -- broadening our reach and answering the strong customer demand for cloud computing services."

"IBM selected us over VMware and Microsoft," Scott Crenshaw, VP and general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit, told CIOZone.

A leading provider of open source solutions, Red Hat brings several key strengths to the cloud market, according to Crenshaw, including its ability "to make cloud computing consumable by the enterprise and at the same time provide a really good quality of service."

Another plus: "We provide all security," added Crenshaw. "We use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel as the security foundation." Enterprise Linux and Enterprise Virtualization both leverage SELinux, developed by the Red Hat security standards team in conjunction with the National Security Agency and the U.S. government.

"Customers are expected to benefit significantly from the collaboration of IBM and Red Hat in enterprise virtualization and cloud computing," Crenshaw said. "Together we aim to break down barriers to virtualization and cloud adoption by providing customers with a stable and robust environment to meet their enterprise applications requirements."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been chosen by a number of organizations seeking to build cloud platforms recently, including the Symbian Foundation, a global non-profit group formed to foster an open source community around its mobile devices. However, the IBM deal serves as a major validation of the Red Hat approach, Crenshaw said.

Comments (1)

	1. 03-18-2010 03:57
	I don't think this deal is surprising given the long term relationship IBM has with Redhat, and the fact that IBM was clearly not going to pick Microsoft. It is somewhat ironic however given that IBM effectively invented the virtualization concept with its mainframe VM operating system. Registered

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